It gave it this sense of impunity and a sense of, you know, the ability to take risks that led to last June's war and now this, this war that started in February, which the United States is once again bogged down in.

So I don't actually disagree so much with what Matt is saying with regard to the Palestinians.

Like I said, I think that, you know, there was this hope in Washington that this would give the Israelis confidence.

I, I certainly didn't put a lot of stock in that, but nevertheless believe that, you know, this is a good agreement because, like I said, the idea that, you know, Israel should remain, you know, vulnerable and isolated and somehow that's better for the Middle East seems to me an odd argument to make.

And that's essentially what Matt, the argument that Matt i-is making.

But no one should mistake saying that this was a pretty good agreement for the idea that, you know, the Palestinians wouldn't be anything but left behind here.

And that clearly, if you knew anything about the Israeli government, that of course they were going to take, uh, advantage of this.

You know, but the, but the idea that it, the Abraham Accords offered a kind of coherent, effective way to deal with it, I just think has not been borne out by what we've seen in the years since they were signed.

Look, I mean, it, this, this is the new normal, isn't it, uh, for the foreseeable future that there's a, a sort of uneasy calm and then one side does something hostile, the other side responds, there's mutual response for a while and then we go back to uneasy calm.

I, I think that's exactly right and I think, uh, that, um, uh, officials, m-members of the public, market participants who thought that the conflict would not end up being a protracted one were not really paying attention and not paying attention to the resources the Iranians had at their disposal and their willingness to resist, uh, the US and Israeli war.

Uh, a- a- and, and here we are seven months later and I think analysts like myself and others understood that the Iranians would resist and that all of the kind of unintended consequences, uh, that have occurred, um, were likely to happen.

So I don't see an end in sight.

I see a stalemate.

I think the way in which you have described it in which there are, uh, periods of uneasy calm punctuated by, uh, escalations and then pullbacks to uneasy calm are likely what we're going to see for the foreseeable future.

And the markets are finally responding correctly.

... where's the off-ramp? And it is as difficult to see now as it was then.